Mashing and clashing sovereignties: how Brexit was conceived in the Irish borderlands

The territorial imaginations of those who live in the borderlands of Ireland/Northern Ireland differ according to their identification with the Irish state or that of the United Kingdom. Contradictions between such imaginations were made less significant in the context of European integration and the 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement, which allowed British and Irish national aspirations for Northern Ireland to be recognised as equally legitimate. The process of Brexit, by which the UK left the European Union, exposed these tensions once more. This is illustrated in discourses of the Irish border offered by local people in the borderlands during this process. In this chapter we explore the competing constructions of sovereignty present in qualitative data gathered through research conducted in the Irish Central Border Region between 2017 (when for UK Withdrawal negotiations began) and 2021 (the year in which the UK left the EU). Before turning to such discourses, we review conceptual debates that suggest a rethinking of state sovereignty: – its relationship to state territory and borders, and the multiplicity of ways and actors through which it is produced, performed and often hybridised. By then drawing on our research with border residents, we interrogate the Irish borderlands itself as the site where Westphalian notions of sovereignty persist in territorial imaginations of citizens even as they experience a post-Westphalian world.